124 quotes found
""I can't believe that people really prefer to go to the concert hall under intellectually trying, socially trying, physically trying conditions, unable to repeat something they have missed, when they can sit at home under the most comfortable and stimulating circumstances and hear it as they want to hear it. I can't imagine what would happen to literature today if one were obliged to congregate in an unpleasant hall and read novels projected on a screen." See: recording Quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ."
""Somebody will ask those of us who compose with the aid of computers: 'So you make all these decisions for the computer or the electronic medium but wouldn't you like to have a performer who makes certain other decisions?' Many composers don't mind collaborating with the performer with regards to decisions of tempo, or rhythm, or dynamics, or timbre, but ask them if they would allow the performer to make decisions with regard to pitch and the answer will be 'Pitches you don't change.' Some of us feel the same way in regard to the other musical aspects that are traditionally considered secondary, but which we consider fundamental. As for the future of electronic music, it seems quite obvious to me that its unique resources guarantee its use, because it has shifted the boundaries of music away from the limitations of the acoustical instrument, of the performer's coordinating capabilities, to the almost infinite limitations of the electronic instrument. The new limitations are the human ones of perception." Quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ."
""We have all been affected as composers, as teachers, as musicians by recordings to an extent that cannot possibly be calculated as yet or predicted for the future. The music which is being most widely disseminated and most widely discussed, and therefore most widely imitated and influential, is that music which is available on records. The music that is only published is very little known. I don't think one can possibly exaggerate the extent to which the climate of music today is determined by the fact that the total Webern is available on records, that the total Schoenberg is becoming available." Quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ."
"Naturally, since I am not concerned with normative allegations, I cannot be concerned here with the invocation of the overtone series as a 'natural' phenomenon, and that application of equivocation which then would label as 'un-natural' (in the sense, it would appear, of morally perverse) music which is not 'founded' on it. Now, what music, in what sense, ever had been founded on it?"
""The issue of 'science' does not intrude itself directly upon the occasion of the performance of a musical work, at least a non-electronically produced work, since—as has been said—there is at least a question as to whether the question as to whether musical composition is to be regarded as a science or not is indeed really a question; but there is no doubt that the question as to whether musical discourse or—more precisely—the theory of music should be subject to the methodological criteria of scientific method and the attendant scientific language is a question, except that the question is really not the normative one of whether it 'should be' or 'must be,' but the factual one that it is, not because of the nature of musical theory, but because of the nature and scope of scientific method and language, whose domain of application is such that if it is not extensible to musical theory, then musical theory is not a theory in any sense in which the term ever has been employed. This should sound neither contentious nor portentous, rather it should be obvious to the point of virtual tautology.”"
"This compositional variety is mediated by a highly redundant set structure, a second-order all-combinatorial set; each set form is hexachordally equivalent to or totally disjunct from fifteen other set forms, so that one-third of all the available set forms belong to a collection of sets which are hexachordally aggregate forming, that is, hexachordally identical."
"I don't think the music is all that different, actually. It is produced and presented in a different way. I don't favour one type of music over another. I like music that is melodic, so I like what I am doing now. I haven't abandoned guitars, I am just a little less angry than I was then. I am still proud of Eve's Plum, and I think they could be Vitamin C songs, and some Vitamin C songs could be Eve's Plum songs. I really like this one, it is the best one of all."
"It was great, I love onions!"
"It's not as if I went from hardcore punk to four-on-the-floor dance music. I always considered the songs I've written to be intelligent pop songs and perhaps just the production that varies but it's still very much the same voice."
"I'm better suited to doing this because I enjoy dancing and performing, so I can incorporate a whole bunch of different elements of my personality into the performance component of Vitamin C and it turns out, without trying, there was a certain positive spirit and strong point of view [in the songs] that fairly well represented my personality. So it all came together quite nicely."
"I decided that instead of replacing members of Eve's Plum and keeping it going against some internal and external odds, I would continue doing music, but do it by myself," explains Fitzpatrick. "But it took me a little while because I wasn't sure I was really ready emotionally and mentally to jump back into the fire immediately."
"You get treated better [laugh], Being a girl about town is different from being a girl with five guys about town."
""The Itch" was an accident. I responded to [co-writer] Billy Steinberg's lyric because I thought even though we set it in this particular story of a girl in a relationship who isn't getting what she needs, it's really a metaphor for desire. Everything just coincided without my realizing it. I was playing Lucy in Dracula 2000, and she's a character who is totally open, sexual and curious and definitely has "The Itch" on many different levels. And it was just coincidence that all this stuff kind of like came together for me. Because I get the itch all the time. And to me that really means something."
"You know that weird cat dance that cats do late at night where they go completely stir-crazy and they run around the apartment and you don't know what the hell they're doing? I often feel like that. I dye my hair constantly because I can't sit still with one hair color. That's a perfect example of trying to satisfy some hunger. I want change; I want constant stimuli. I love to fly because I love the high. All of these are like itch kind of things. Sometimes I need to completely get away. I'll get in the car and I'll drive for as long as I can drive. Sometimes it's a sexual urge. I don't need to explain that; it's pretty self-explanatory. It's a craving, a desire. Sometimes it's food. I'm just a giant, big ol' consumer. I want, I need, I crave, I can't say no. I have no control and I'm a complete control freak. It's just crazy [laughs]."
"I'm not quite sure that I know how they complement each other, because I use them for the opposite reason. I find music to be an intensely personal kind of thing, perhaps it's because I write a lot of the stuff. I use acting to escape from being me, and I use music to explore being me. I think that's the best way to put it."
"I haven't found it difficult because I find this very enjoyable. It's really challenging. And I'm really proud of the record because it's a really good record. There's nothing harder than to write a pop record with meaning. I think it's much easier to be alternative. It's much easier to be different and take a different path outside of a commercial context. To try and write a pop song that is not cliché, to try and write a pop song that has meaning and fits in under three minutes and five seconds and has a hook that people want to listen to is the most difficult thing in the world to do. So in lieu of that you have to write what you know and what you like, what you're feeling. That's all I can basically do. I don't begrudge the other people that don't write their songs. And I don't judge them. I'd like to see more people writing their own songs, because that's just personally what I like. Just for me, as an artist, so many people only care about being popular right now. Whatever happened to trying to write a song that means something? When I was growing up, artists meant something. They had opinions, they looked different than the person working at the store on your street. They opened your eyes and taught you something about life. And I would like to aspire to be that kind of artist."
"I learned I'm not the kind of artist that can just sing someone else's songs, for a lot of reasons. I have to have some sort of understanding of the song, or some sort of attachment to it."
"The genius of Jamie is NOT that she wrote the lyrics on her hands, but that she didn't think we'd notice"
"Like any great performer, Rosa pulls you in, and I found myself leaning forward, and really paying attention...but most of all, trying to figure out what the HELL she was saying"
"This is Howard Cosell telling it like it is."
"Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Sonny Liston's not coming out! Sonny Liston's not coming out! He's out! The winner and new heavyweight champion of the world is Cassius Clay!"
"The Rooneys are the finest people, the people I most respect in American sports ownership. I've always felt that way. And there's no reason to change. They are people of integrity and character... I have a whole transcendental feeling for the Steelers and the Rooneys and Pittsburgh."
"Crowd screaming chanting ALI! ALI! Legends die hard and Ali is learning that even he can not be forever young."
"He is working Duran effectively....and Duran must resolve from pulling in...and he does...WHAT?! DURAN HAS QUIT?! ROBERTO DURAN HAS QUIT!!! There can be no other explanation. Pandemonium in the ring, and Roberto Duran has quit!"
"This, we have to say it, remember this is just a football game, no matter who wins or loses. An unspeakable tragedy, confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City: John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous, perhaps, of all of The Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead … on … arrival. Hard to go back to the game after that newsflash, which in duty bound, we had to take."
"That little monkey. The theorem was that he was too small to play in the NFL."
"Look at that little monkey run!"
"That little monkey gets loose, doesn't he?"
"I was infected with my desire, my resolve, to make it in broadcasting. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and how."
"[T]hey wanted... another Joe Louis. A white man's black man... Didn't these idiots realize that Cassius Clay was the name of a slave owner? … Had I been black and my name Cassius Clay, I damned well would have changed it!"
"I'm one helluva communicator."
"He's going to go all-the-way. (often quoted by Cosell during the "Halftime Highlights" segment of ABC's Monday Night Football games to announce touchdowns scored in games on Sunday a day earlier. Adopted as a tribute, and modified to include a hesitating voice cadence by Chris Berman of ESPN as He could... go... all... the … way!)"
"Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, persecuting, distasteful, verbose, a show off. There's no question that I'm all of those things."
"There it is, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning."
"History will reflect that Howard Cosell was easily the dominant sportscaster of all time, and certainly the most famous."
"Historian (showing Miles a tape of Howard Cosell): At first we didn't know exactly what this was, but we've developed a theory. We feel that when citizens in your society were guilty of a crime against the state, they were forced to watch this. Miles Monroe (Woody Allen): Yes. That's exactly what that was."
"50% of the people hated him, 50% of the people liked him, 100% of them tuned in to hear him."
"If you're a woman who doesn't know how to write, you're going to cry every night. But if you do, no problem."
"When I was little I definitely was sad a lot and I used to dream. I used to get these obsessive crushes on non-available guys. Not any more, but that was my life for a long time."
"I think there's too much emphasis on beauty. I find it so limiting. I think just be yourself. Be who you are."
"Self acceptance is the sexiest thing to me."
"I have never forgotten how the deprivation of work erodes human beings, those not working and those related to them. And from that time on, I loathed an economic that could put a huge part of its workforce on the streets with no compunction."
"My university education had been a shallow and superficial enterprise. The central driving forces of the economy I lived in were either ignored or left vague, to the point of meaningless."
"In the postindustrial age, labor is seen as essentially uninvolved in the social process because there is no need for assertive labor."
"Triumphant capitalism has unleashed a powerful drive toward inequality, not improvement, in the social sphere."
"The actions and inactions of hundreds of millions of people and nearly 200 states, will affect what kind of world emerges in the time ahead."
"How well a posse policy will fare in a world with 3 billion people below the poverty line and nuclear warheads scattered around a dozen or more regions like melons in a field, is not easy to imagine."
"Ultimately, each transnational firm strives for its own advantage, and is supported in that effort by the state power wherein it resides, or at least where its main shareholders are domiciled."
"In the 1990's, a time of corporate capital's global ascendancy, the mildest restraints on its prerogatives have been peremptorily rejected. Automatically, under this designation, measures to protect national cultural industries, for example, have been ruled unacceptable infringements of "free trade"."
"The flow of information it promotes is free in one respect only. The flow is expected to be freely admitted to all the spaces that its providers desire to transmit to. Otherwise there is nothing free about the information. Quite the contrary. Information and message flows are already, and will continue to be, priced to exact the highest revenues extractable."
"With deregulation, one sector of the economy after another is "liberated" to capital's unmonitored authority. The very notion that there is a public interest is contested."
"Though some still see the Internet, for example, as a democratic structure for international individual expression, it is more realistic to recognize it as only the latest technological vehicle to be turned, sooner or later, to corporate advantage - for advertising, marketing and general corporate aggrandizement."
"How did thinking that benefited the few gain the acceptance of the many?"
"Capitalism cannot be reduced to one or a few features, but it does possess one relationship, central to its existence and operation, that constitutes the essence of inequality and ineradicable instability: the wage-labor-capital connection that dwells at the heart of the system."
"how can a democratic discourse exist in a corporate owned informational system? Who, for example, possesses freedom of speech in such a society?"
"Deregulation has been, above all else, a means of reducing corporate business's accountability to the public."
"But revolutionary is not an acceptable term to those who benefit from, and deny at the same time, the savage exploitativeness of the social system."
"The "cumulative effects" of unbridled commercialism, however difficult to assess, constitute one key to the impact of growing up in the core of the world's marketing system. Minimally, it suggests unpreparedness for, and lack of interest in, the world that exists outside the shopping mall."
"One growing threat to the stability of the U.S. economy, and therefore to its capability to continue to direct the global order, paradoxically emerges from its success in establishing capitalism around the world."
"Popular dissatisfaction seems to occur only when the shopping or the commercials are interrupted. In such an atmosphere, is there any reason to imagine that saturation shopping could be a source of instability to the U.S. world position?"
"[Response when asked by a reporter if his ‘relationship with the governor is deteriorating'] No, I think it’s pretty much consistent."
"My father was a picture of courage in terms of his war service and strength, and yet in his decline, I learned primarily negative lessons. I learned what not to do. [about his father] I have a real respect, and a real anger and sadness at the same time. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to do the math on exactly what it all means."
"Look, the New Democrat approach, from my point of view, didn't work. That governing approach didn't stop the progression that led us to a thoroughly Republican House and now Senate, and a national debate that doesn't even address the real issues. The economic crisis of today — the only parallel is the Great Depression. That's just a fact. The difference is, there's no light at the end of the tunnel now."
"Tonight we took another big step toward a fairer city for all, tonight another ratification of all that we’ve been doing together and it’s going to give us the fuel to go farther."
"If you could remove News Corp from the last 25 years of American history, we would be in an entirely different place."
"My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed. I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups. This is about stopping this disease and saving lives. Period."
"Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum are victims. They should be alive today. The only reason they’re not is because a violent, dangerous man chose to take a gun across state lines and start shooting people. To call this a miscarriage of justice is an understatement."
"Governor Cuomo has complete discretion to be able to issue mass clemencies for the prisons. We know that de Blasio, the mayor, has the power to be able to release hundreds and thousands of people from Rikers Island and other jails. And so we really want them to be able to do that. There’s lots of pressure and demands that have been issued by local groups."
"I became a vegetarian at 15. I was never a big meat eater — I was always picky. I was raised in a kosher home, and if you're raised with a food restriction, it's not that difficult to have another kind of food restriction. … At some point, I had a dream that I was eating chicken. But in the dream, I understood that it was actually miniature human legs and arms. My brain was connecting muscle and bone to another animal. Once I had made that connection, it just wasn't something I wanted to eat."
"Vegetarianism is a really important part of what we need to do to help the environment. The meat industry is really toxic to the environment. The cattle industry — besides the fact that there's a lot of cruel things happening — the manure is extremely toxic. We just need to pull back as a culture as much as we can."
"When I was 13, I told my parents I didn’t believe in God any more. I wanted to be an atheist because I believed that religion should be about community and having a place to go in prayer, not something that should determine women’s freedoms."
"I like being able to play make believe as my job. I think I played make-believe growing up a little too long—probably to an inappropriate age. I played make-believe until I was, like, 13 and probably should have been doing something else. But other than that, it’s fun to be able to have to learn about different people. My favorite thing is you have to learn how to work with people that you probably would never try [to]. Some people just aren’t supposed to be in a room together, and you have to be in a room with a group of people who might not all get along and you have to figure out how to come together for one thing. That collaboration is special, and people don’t get to exercise that. I think that’s why people become stubborn, and I think that’s why people become uninspired to change. In this job you have to."
"The struggle comes when you're displaced, when someone is in an industry where they worry about people taking advantage and they don't know what to do with that. I've been lucky not having to worry about that aspect of it as well."
"I think it's important not to believe anyone when they tell you're good; maybe that's not healthy. But I think if you start to think of yourself the way that people you that you work with speak to you, then that's dangerous."
"I'd like to be more like her where I am always emotional. But to be in this world and to be able to function in it, we should probably put on our layers of socially correct behaviour."
"I was 10 and I was curious about auditioning … and I realized very quickly it wasn't for me because I was missing my sports teams, my dance class and all the extracurricular activities at school. But during that time, I thought, 'I don't want to be associated with [Mary-Kate and Ashley],' for some reason. I guess I understood what nepotism was like inherently as a 10-year-old. I don't know if I knew the word, but there is some sort of association of not earning something that I think bothered me at a very young age."
"People don’t need careers. People should just exist."
"If you don't like something, talk about something else that's great and maybe someone else will discover it and think it's great too."
"What keeps you confident in a healthy way is knowing that everyone else around you is going to support you and teach you and you're going to learn from them. I just feel open to learning from people."
"Enjoy the little things in life."
"I believe that you are only in control of so much. So whatever you are not in control of you can’t worry about."
"I think every day you try to soak up as much as you can to learn and understand things better."
"There are people skills that you develop, there's a lot of empathy you build, there’s a lot of putting yourself in other people's shoes. And what you put in is what you receive! There's just so much that you get from working with a group of people intimately, and that's one of my favorite aspects of the job."
"Whatever your theory is, keep the cliché condolences to yourself. No one will be uttering, “Sorry for your loss” in Wanda’s world."
"There is as much wisdom in listening as there is in speaking - and that goes for all relationships, not just romantic ones."
"It takes facing obstacles to grow strong enough to overcome them."
"As someone of Korean descent, I am certain my road was a bit hard. I have to say anyone who's an aspiring actor has a difficult road regardless of race."
"It's one thing to talk about lack of diversity and lack of representation. But that doesn't matter if you're not good at what you're supposed to be doing."
"But there’s no doubt it stung when I felt like the people I was trying to respect and please the most were the ones who were critical of me. It was painful because, as my career since then has borne out, I take a great deal of pride in being Korean American. I know that not every representation is 100 percent something we can stand behind all the time, but I choose to look at things as whether they’re moving the needle of progress on a larger scale."
"I think any time you have an ensemble of actors, everyone’s objectives are unique and individual. So it’s hard for me to collectively say whether they were allies in this…. I do know that the way things got spun by the end changed my relationships with them."
"Alone we are much weaker than if we are allied with others who care, not just about Asian Americans, but about the issue of hate and discrimination and bigotry in general. Now I wouldn’t deign to try and compare the Asian American experience to any other minorities’ experience in America, because each one is unique in their own ways. But what we do have in common is that we have all experienced bigotry. We have all experienced prejudice. What’s most important to understand is that this is a human issue. This is not just an Asian American one."
"The fact that you have representation on TV means that you can have an understanding of someone who doesn’t necessarily look like you and that understanding can bring acceptance and empathy. And so that’s why it’s important to have a positive but fully fleshed out portrayals of Asian Americans in the media."
"I think there are pluses and minuses to the emergence of Asian cinema in America. It's about time that a lot of these films got recognized because there are very talented people behind them - the directors, actors, writers. I don't think it is a coincidence that a lot of stories from Asia are being remade by American studios. They are really interesting stories and deserve to be shown here."
"Be proud to be Asian. Be proud to be American. You've earned the right to be both and we can all work together to be a united America. That's the hope. That's the dream."
"You know, someone once said that we have, you know, a privilege card, because we are not necessarily African American or Latinx. And part of that privilege card has been perpetuated this idea, the model minority myth. But what we've been finding is that in times of stress that privilege card gets taken away very quickly and then we're reduced to someone--to a group of people who is considered other and not American."
"The difference between being a good governor and president is approximately the difference between sandlot basketball and the NBA Finals."
"The simple and terrifying reality, forbidden from discussion in America, was that despite spending $600 billion a year on the military, despite having the best fighting force the world had ever known, they were getting their asses kicked by illiterate peasants who made bombs out of manure and wood."
"The general's staff is a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs. There's a former head of British Special Forces, two Navy Seals, an Afghan Special Forces commando, a lawyer, two fighter pilots and at least two dozen combat veterans and counterinsurgency experts. They jokingly refer to themselves as Team America, taking the name from the South Park-esque sendup of military cluelessness, and they pride themselves on their can-do attitude and their disdain for authority."
"I write furiously, admonishing myself when I seem about to fall into the old habit of editing sentences as they appear. I want to discover what it is I am going to be writing about, who is in the story and what they are doing there."
"Since I am a slow writer and a compulsive editor, I try not to stop too often"
"At the start of a new fiction project, there is always a piece written quickly, assuredly, with little hesitation, and with the euphoric feeling that comes with knowing one has found somewhere to begin"
"Who and whatever James was, so was Jesus."
"That mess about judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin — that's some bullshit. Nobody has the right to judge anybody else. Period. If you ain't been in my skin, you ain't never gonna understand my character."
""Slavery is not the only story about black people. It’s only a small story! Don’t they know that if tomorrow a slave ship arrived at Elmina to carry us to America, so many Ghanaians would climb on board that this ship would sink to the bed of the ocean from our weight?" He laughed. I couldn’t help laughing myself. But who was the butt of the joke?"
"From the very inception of the Gulf Crisis, the dominant US media failed to fulfil the role of independent journalism. Instead it acted as public relations for the State Department, assimilating the language, terminology, and the assumptions of the administration, thereby undermining any critical perspectives upon the conduct of the war. Any attempt to discuss the media's coverage of the Gulf War must examine some of the ways in which it structured identification with the Pentagon's agenda, and the interests of an international elite."
"Hussein as the villain, Bush as the hero, and the US rescuing the victim is typical of colonial narratives...The analogy insists, furthermore, on a Eurocentric approach to Jewish history. In seeing Jewish history through a Euro-American Jewish perspective, the US media have presented Israel simplistically as a Western country populated by European Jews. Reading and watching media images from the Middle East, one is led to believe that there are only Euro-American Jews in Israel and only Moslem Arabs in the rest of the Middle East. One finds few images of Iraqi, Moroccan, or Ethiopian Israelis, even though Oriental Arab Jews compose the majority of the Jewish population in Israel."
"While the celebrations of Columbus' "discovery" have provoked lively opposition, the Eurocentric framing of the "other 1492" has been little questioned."
"Eurocentric historical discourse tends to paint a flattering picture of Europe during the "Age of Discovery" while denigrating the newly colonized peoples. At the time of the onset of colonialism and conquest, Europe was a rather brutal and superstitious place, dominated by a "demonological discourse" (Delumeau). Church-sponsored brutalities towards Jews and Muslims have to be seen therefore on the same continuum as the forced conversions of indigenous peoples of the Americas who, like the Jews and Muslims in Catholic Spain, were obliged to feign allegiance to Christianity."
"The elision of comparative discussion of the Muslim and Jewish situations in Christian Spain is rooted in present-day Middle Eastern politics. The 1992 commemorations reflect present-day battles over the representations of history. Subordinated to a Eurocentric Zionist historiography, they lament yet another tragic episode in a homogenous, static Jewish history of relentless persecution."
"The uniqueness and common victimization of all Jews at all times is a crucial underpinning of official Israeli ideology. The genocides of indigenous Americans and Africans are not a point of reference, while the linked persecution in Iberia of Jews and Muslims, Conversos and Moriscos, is rendered irrelevant. This selective reading of Jewish history hijacks the Jews of Islam from their Judeo-Islamic history and culture and subordinates their experience to that of the Ashkenazi-European shtetl, presented as a "universal" Jewish experience. In the Zionist "proof" of a single Jewish experience, there are no parallels or overlappings with other religious/ethnic communities. All Jews are by definition closer to each other than to the cultures of which they have been part. The Jews of Islam, and more specifically Arab Jews, problematize this Eurocentric representation."
"This picture of an ageless and relentless oppression and humiliation ignores the fact that, on the whole, Jews of Islam-a minority among several other religious/ethnic communities-lived relatively comfortably within Arab-Muslim society. My point is not to idealize the situation of the Jews of Islam, but rather to suggest that, with a few exceptions, the agendas of Zionist and anti-Zionist historians have either subsumed Islamic-Jewish history into Christian-Jewish history or ignored the status of Jews in the context of other minorities in Islamic societies."
"For Middle Easterners, the operating distinction had always been “Muslim,” “Jew” and “Christian,” not Arab versus Jew. The assumption was that “Arabness” referred to a common shared culture and language, albeit with religious differences."
"Now that the three cultural topographies that compose my ruptured and dislocated history – Iraq, Israel and the United States – have been involved in a war, it is crucial to say that we exist. Some of us refuse to dissolve so as to facilitate “neat” national and ethnic divisions. My anxiety and pain during the (1991) Scud attacks on Israel, where some of my family lives, did not cancel out my fear and anguish for the victims of the bombardment of Iraq, where I also have relatives. War, however, is the friend of binarisms, leaving little place for complex identities."
"To be a European or American Jew has hardly been perceived as a contradiction, but to be an Arab Jew has been seen as a kind of logical paradox, even an ontological subversion. This binarism has led many Oriental Jews (our name in Israel, referring to our common Asian and African countries of origin, is Mizrahi or Mizrachi) to a profound and visceral schizophrenia, since for the first time in our history Arabness and Jewishness have been imposed as antonyms."
"Intellectual discourse in the West highlights a Judeo-Christian tradition, yet rarely acknowledges the Judeo-Muslim culture of the Middle East, of North Africa, or of pre-Expulsion Spain (1492) and of the European parts of the Ottoman Empire. The Jewish experience in the Muslim world has often been portrayed as an unending nightmare of oppression and humiliation."
"Although I in no way want to idealize that experience – there were occasional tensions, discriminations, even violence – on the whole, we lived quite comfortably within Muslim societies. Our history simply cannot be discussed in European Jewish terminology."
"The same historical process that dispossessed Palestinians of their property, lands and national-political rights, was linked to the dispossession of Middle Eastern and North African Jews of their property, lands, and rootedness in Muslim countries. As refugees, or mass immigrants (depending on one’s political perspective), we were forced to leave everything behind and give up our Iraqi passports. The same process also affected our uprootedness or ambiguous positioning within Israel itself, where we have been systematically discriminated against by institutions that deployed their energies and material to the consistent advantage of European Jews and to the consistent disadvantage of Oriental Jews. Even our physiognomies betray us, leading to internalized colonialism or physical misperception. Sephardic Oriental women often dye their dark hair blond, while the men have more than once been arrested or beaten when mistaken for Palestinians. What for Ashkenazi immigrants from Russia and Poland was a social aliya (literally “ascent”) was for Oriental Sephardic Jews a yerida (“descent”). Stripped of our history, we have been forced by our no-exit situation to repress our collective nostalgia, at least within the public sphere. The pervasive notion of “one people” reunited in their ancient homeland actively disauthorizes any affectionate memory of life before Israel. We have never been allowed to mourn a trauma that the images of Iraq’s destruction only intensified and crystallized for some of us. Our cultural creativity in Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic is hardly studied in Israeli schools, and it is becoming difficult to convince our children that we actually did exist there, and that some of us are still there in Iraq, Morocco, Yemen and Iran."
"Western media much prefer the spectacle of the triumphant progress of Western technology to the survival of the peoples and cultures of the Middle East. The case of Arab Jews is just one of many elisions. From the outside, there is little sense of our community, and even less sense of the diversity of our political perspectives."
"every child is born into a web of multiple affiliations, intersecting identities, and potential identifications."
"After World War Two, with decolonization and partitions, life shifted for many communities. There were transfers of populations, wherein one identity was transformed into another identity. A Muslim Indian became a Pakistani. In our case, Arab-Jews became Israelis. All of this happened virtually overnight. These new official identities did not reflect the feelings of the displaced people, and could not translate the contradictions on the ground. This new situation did not necessarily reflect those communities` sense of belonging. Hence, a crucial tension was generated between one`s official documentation and one`s emotional map of identity and sense of home and belonging. I have tried to explain this historical context in order to make sense out of our brutal rupture in the wake of partition. I grew up in Israel as a Jew, in a country that defines itself as a state for the Jews and as a Jewish state, which was presumably a solution for “the Jewish problem.” But for which Jews, and a solution for what? Being schooled in Hebrew in a Jewish state required that I completely reject everything associated with my home: namely, the Arabic that we spoke at home; my Iraqi parents; my Iraqi grandparents who didn't speak a word of Hebrew. The fact is that many people in my community missed Baghdad. But in this context, Iraq and the Iraqis were the enemy of the state to which we now officially belonged. I often describe my experience as a child as one of virtual schizophrenia, where I had to simultaneously live two identities, one outside of the home and another inside the home...The conflict between Israeli Zionism and Arab nationalism generated a situation where we had no place."
"in recent times, largely because of the Arab-Israeli conflict, there has been a construction in the public sphere of Jews and Muslims as always already enemies. In the media, journalists often appeal to the cliché that “this conflict goes back thousands of years.” But historically that is false; it largely goes back to the late nineteenth century and the emergence of Zionism. For many centuries and even millennia, Jews and Muslims often faced Christian prejudice together...The two stories/histories of Jews and Muslims are often told in isolation, but in fact the two groups were subjected to the same inquisition and continued to live together within Muslim spaces. In my work, I have insisted on the Judeo-Muslim hyphen, because while the Judeo-Christian hyphen implies a legitimate meta-narrative, the Judeo-Muslim hyphen has been elided. Yet, historically the Judeo-Muslim hyphen could be seen as the norm rather than the Judeo-Christian, which is a relatively recent phenomenon, going back to the Euro-Jewish enlightenment and reinforced by Zionist Eurocentrism."
"The particular/universal dichotomy often gets enlisted into a rescue narrative. We cannot forget how colonial discourse often represented colonialism as not simply conquering and exploiting, but also as advancing a universal civilizing mission, rescuing those barbaric people–especially, of course, their women and children–from their own horrible traditions, rituals, and culture. This idealist discourse was framed by the arrogant imperialism that saw itself as bringing light to dark places. This is unfortunately one side of the enlightenment. And addressing the intersection of the Enlightenment metanarrative with colonial discourse does not mean rejecting the Enlightenment in general. The Enlightenment is a complex phenomenon featuring contradictory discourses; what is required, therefore, is to highlight its philosophical contradictions as wells as its imperial dark side “on the ground.” In the colonial context, the Enlightenment often meant cultural subordination and psychic devastation. So the question is, what is a “barbaric practice,” and who has the right to determine what is barbaric? Who has the right to say, “I am the savior of these children?”"
"Zionism, to my mind, can be described as an effort to whiten the Jew philosophically and even literally."
"Because I was of African descent, that unless I could afford to go to Europe for final 'polishing' in my music, I would probably end up singing in a cabaret in America. If I chose science, my chances were better for a good future."